Tesla owner asks $1m in Model X fiery crash with Falcon Wing doors not opening - <AUTHOR> https://electrek.co/2017/04/23/tesla-model-x-fire-crash-falcon-wing-doors-stuck/ <comment><USER2> Why do people keep expecting Tesla to pay for crashes when the vehicles perform better than the average other vehicle on the road? I was involved in a crash, a drunk pulled in front of me, and the chassis bent a bit and i could open either front door, and had to crawl out the back... thats just a normal thing in car accidents, and it cant be avoided... and there is room to get out of the vehicle from the front.

Tesla has been proven safer in crashes, and less likely to be in a crash in the first place. The driver crashed into a stationary object, sue the driver, not the car company.

<comment><USER3> The allure of a big payout seems to cloud a lot of people's judgement. Do people try to sue/demand money from Ford/Honda/etc the same way these stories are popping up for Tesla?

I'm curious if we're only seeing these stories because Tesla is such a hot topic.

<comment><USER4> IDK, the Ford Pinto got handed it's ass some decades back.

Ralph Nader made a name for himself writing a book about car companies selling death-traps.

This is how the industry changes — Tesla is not the first.

Or maybe their owners, paying $100K or so a car, feel a little more entitled to receive a safe car for all that dosh?

<comment><USER2> JKCalhoun, that would be applicable if the Tesla was less safe than other vehicles, but its consistently shown to be more safe than most vehicles... Even the battery fires everyone goes on and on about, Teslas (based on accident rates, to scale the data) are much less likely to catch fire than a gasoline powered car. They are safe in impacts as well...

<comment><USER5> There's an issue with the door _so they 're getting sued for the door issue_. It's not some kind of general indictment of Tesla nor Elon Musk, it's just that lawsuits are alas one of the very few ways that disputes can be resolved in our non-centrally-planned economy.

Does liability law sometimes cause bad collateral damage (like you mentioned here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14187563](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14187563) with general aviation)? Yes. But that doesn't mean that every lawsuit over a vehicle is inappropriate.

Tesla vehicles are safer than most other vehicles but that isn't an excuse for sub-par design around emergency egress. This story have been "my Tesla crashed and has battery fire but the conveniently-located door override nevertheless let me get out fast" \-- I'm disappointed because _Tesla could have done better_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So they want $1m because.. they have nightmares about what would have happened if they couldn't get out of the car? Tesla certainly isn't to blame for the crash, and it sounds like they're not to blame for it catching on fire either. In addition, the passengers didn't even try the emergency door release levers (presumably because they didn't know about them, even though they're documented in the physical owner's manual).

Honestly, this just sounds like a money grab to me.

<comment><USER7> _...The owner of the vehicle and her boyfriend were sitting in the second-row seat..._

Um, where was the _driver_? Did he/she flee the scene or something? Killed in the crash?

<comment><USER8> Says in the article they had a chauffeur.

<comment><USER7> I meant, where was the driver when it came to helping the couple out of the wrecked vehicle?

<comment><USER8> I've been in an accident once and immediately after I was in a state of shock, very confused and on auto-mode. Or maybe the driver dies in the accident, so I'm not really sure how this is relevant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The Falcon wing doors were a mistake. Not having a manual way to open the door is also a mistake.

I'm not sure if these people deserve compensation but there should be a way to open the doors manually without relying on hydraulics.

<comment><USER8> It's just another case of aesthetics coming before function or safety.

See airplane doors for a comparison: [http://c8.alamy.com/comp/DK7AW8/airplane-door-cabin-door- on-...](http://c8.alamy.com/comp/DK7AW8/airplane-door-cabin-door-on-a- commercial-jet-airliner-airbus-a321-DK7AW8.jpg)

Of course, there is no need to have such "ugly" or big notices, but certainly a small text "Remove cover here and pull lever to open" is doable.

<comment><USER5> That "carefully remove the speaker grill" is the chosen phraseology means that these are instructions meant for maintenance and service, not instructions meant for emergency egress. Furthermore, the latch release cable doesn't provide much leverage and access at all, given it's literally _at floor level_. It's also possible that the latch release cable requires a lot of force to pull (if you have to pull against springs or pull against frictional forces on contact surfaces of latches). These factors make me conclude that this system was never designed for emergency egress purposes.

However, these are not an inherent issue; it's certainly possible to store energy (compressed gas, auxiliary battery, springs, pyrotechnic charge) to provide a redundant opening system in case the main power supply is offline. Using stored energy to activate emergency safety apparatus (hi, airbags) is not a new thing in passenger vehicles. Hell, some cars have _pyrotechnic cable-cutters_ that isolate all non-essential 12V/HV circuits _with explosives_ milliseconds after a severe collision are detected (to avoid post- crash fire/heating and electronics damage).

To solve a eminently predictable post-crash problem with "take off a speaker grill that's on the floor (right next to a battery fire) and pull hard on a Bowden cable" is simply not acceptable and the state of the art in post-crash systems indicates that Tesla could have done much better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Some semi-hidden latch is shockingly poor UX, and frankly I am surprised this is coming out of Tesla. It appears as though _nobody_ has gone through an emergency scenario with these doors. It isn't fucking hard either - the basic rule is: "when in an emergency situation, 99.999% of the population will not turn into Rambo or Bear Grylls, but instead their faculties will drop to basics. We start to see in flashes as opposed to "streaming" and we start to perceive the world in black and white as opposed to color. The amygdala will be in control, and is really good at pumping us full of go-fast juice, and kinda sucks at higher level reasoning."

So to cater for an emergency scenario, make everything simple, obvious, and wherever possible, dependent on muscle memory. The emergency release should depend on whatever mechanism is already used for that door (no idea what it is now), but _more_ \- if it is a latch, have some mechanism where if you pull the latch _much harder_ it becomes a mechanical device that opens the door. In the case of these wing doors that move up, make the whole door drop off the hinges or something. In the case of an electric button, make it so that if you depress it even more, again it becomes a mechanical device. etc. WTF, Tesla?

</comment><comment><USER11> So, the only way to leave the car in case of an accident is not documented in the digital version of the manual?

That has to be a major oversight, especially for people able to afford a driver it's unrealistic to expect they'd read the manual (they've got better to do with their time), or to expect that they give the one single physical copy they have to a driver (instead, usually, the driver gets a PDF on a kindle – you might replace the driver a few months later again, and might not get the manual back otherwise).

So it's not surprising that the passengers and the driver didn't know about that.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is the typical Tesla response:

> First of all, the lives of the owner and passengers were not threaten.

Reminds me of Tesla's section to the decapitated driver: "A human wouldn't have seen the truck either" or the unroll.me response.

Seems like their life _was_ in danger. How about, "Sorry to learn what happened" and to look at changing the accessibility of the manual release. This is why we have consumer safety regulations.

</comment><comment><USER13> I can't believe people are actually defending Tesla here. Truly there's no limit to fanboyism.

</comment><comment><USER14> My first thought in a car crash where the doors didn't open (which happens on regular doors, too, if they get physically damaged), would be to smash out the window with a glass breaker. Are Tesla windows particularly challenging to break?

<comment><USER15> And where would you get a glass breaker? I wouldn't be surprise if you had one on your keychain, but is the expectation that most people will?

I don't understand the mindset where commenters chime in with what they'd do in the situation (most of the time they've read the manual front to back, they have a dozen gadgets in their cargo pants for just this occasion).

Isn't it more worthwhile to discuss what the expectation would be for the average consumer? Imagining someone like my grandmother in that situation tends to set expectations well.

<comment><USER14> I actually keep them in my car velcroed into the door pockets (the combo seatbelt/glass breaker kind). I'm arguing that Tesla probably would be better off providing a tool like that (easy) vs. trying to figure out how to do a good manual override (hard).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if any other companies with electrically actuated doors have faced similar lawsuits? Chevrolet Corvette comes to mind with the push buttons...

<comment><USER17> Doesn't matter: Model X's doors can be opened with a physical emergency latch in the event of power failure.

Apparently, the owner of the vehicle couldn't be bothered to read the manual. _Oh well_.

<comment><USER16> It's hardly an emergency latch if you have to read a manual first.

That would be like hiding a fire alarm or exitinguisher behind a painting and placing a small sign underneath indicating it's presence, hardly useful in a real emergency unless people are informed.

This is more accurately described as a manual backup since you apparently have to remove a speaker grill to access it.</comment></comment></comment>


Can people get their hacked (bitfinex) Bitcoins back (1:4 rate 45 min delivery)? - <AUTHOR> http://fuckethereum.com/ <comment><USER2> Did anyone try this?</comment>


MacBook Air Haters: Suck My Dick - <AUTHOR> http://wilshipley.com/blog/2008/01/macbook-air-haters-suck-my-dick.html

<comment><USER2> The author also mentions that he just had a supercharger installed on his Lotus. He's not "normal people". He obviously has a lot of disposable income and the desire to spend it on expensive toys. There's nothing wrong with that; the MBA was designed with him in mind. If I had that kind of spare cash, I'd get one too - right after the supercharged Lotus.

<comment><USER3> Expensive toys... like the iPod? Apple has never marketed to the kind of "normal people" you're talking about.

They've marketed to people with designer homes, designer clothes, and designer children; college students (working ridiculous hours at high-paying jobs but with no high-charging commitments such as a mortgage); and schools (who have large sums of government money and a strong desire to use it for anything other than improving learning quality).

Additionally, the Mac v PC ads appeal to hipsters, the same people that buy $300 pairs of jeans, and soccer moms, the same people that buy $30000 minivans.

The inexpensive Apple products are just things to buy for your children, your relatives, or your spouse to integrate them into the Apple fold. When those kids grow up, they'll buy [the expensive] Macs as well. It's a loss leader in the same way that Adobe feigns interest in copy-protecting Photoshop--when the people that crack it hone their skills and start actual graphic design careers, where else will they turn for official, licensed on-the-job software?

<comment><USER4> derefr, Unfortunately, you are either jealous and letting that affect your judgment or you completely fail to understand that there are real-world reasons to own a Mac. I bought a Mac because I wanted a system that is designed rather than evolved, comes with software I actually want to use (iMovie, Garageband, iPhoto), is secure, and not a target for viruses/spyware, and can occasionally play my Windows video games and host my Windows development environment.

The reason I switched my mom, inlaws, brother and sister to Macs is because I got damned sick and tired of being their IT Helpdesk every other weekend -- diagnosing problems, rebuilding machines infected with spyware & viruses, installing patches and fixes, etc. I've got better things to do with my life such as making original content (music & video) with the computer. However, some people just enjoy farting around with settings. That's not me.

Those commercials appeal to me: a 40-year-old guy wearing $17 Wrangler jeans and a t-shirt from Target. You know why? Because they bring out the defensive XP fanboys such as yourself. We laugh at the commercials, then we laugh at you. Now run along. Don't you have some patches to install or something to update?

\--Jack

<comment><USER3> I'm sorry for coming off as an "XP fanboy"--I didn't mean to sound _negative_ with anything I said. I fit into at least three of the groups I mentioned, currently am on my third iPod, and am thinking of getting the very Macbook Air I'm talking about. I love OS X, but that has nothing to do with my argument. I know full-well that I'm in the upper-middle class, and you probably are too-- you've just chosen, like most enthusiasts, to spend your money on technology rather than fashion.

The fact that Apple has a successfully viral strategy in using their more inexpensive products (such as the Mac Mini) to guide people into buying complementary products (such as the Apple TV, Cinema displays, and Airport Express) and eventually fully integrate them into the "Mac lifestyle" is the mark of a _smart_ company, and exactly what Microsoft wishes it had when it refers to a lacking "consumer experience." They probably never will as long as they don't control the hardware, though.

Of course, from the perspective of the consumer, Apple products are sometimes the "pragmatic decision." However, in all of this, I was referring to Apple's marketing department's intended market for their products and services, not necessarily the "long tail" of economic and word-of-mouth users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For those not familiar with Wil Shipley, this is his style, so MacBook Air haters: don't take it personally. :)

Some context: he founded The Omni Group software back when OS X was NEXTSTEP. They became pretty successful when Apple bought NeXT and released Mac OS X. He left and founded Delicious Monster, which makes one of the more successful useless OS X applications, Delicious Library.

<comment><USER6> they've sold more than 50,000 copies apparently. most of the employees he's had at delicious monster have been poached by apple over the years. most recently that of mike matas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Will Shipley can be an ass... but this otherwise worthless blog post has one nugget of useful info -

"My MacBook Air with 2GB of RAM and 1.8 GHz cores and the SSD compiles Delicious Library 2 from scratch in 1:59.4. My MacBook Pro with 3GB of RAM and 2.3GHz cores and an HD compile it in... 2:04.3."

SSD may be worth the extra money.

</comment><comment><USER8> Yay for him.

 _cough_ douche bag _cough_

<comment><USER9> Yeah, that's certainly what he sounded like here (though I'm sure he's a great guy -- we've all got our soapboxes). I stopped reading after this:

" _I have no fucking idea where the hard drive is in my MacBook Pro, and even if you drew me a damn diagram with labels and numbers and gave me a replacement drive I wouldn't open my machine even in exchange for a year with Zooey Deschanel._ "

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "..what you think is cool is NOT what my mom thinks is cool, or what an executive thinks is cool, or what a lawyer who just wants to write a deposition on her laptop thinks is cool.."

I'm sure an executive doesn't think it's cool that the battery's going to die on them before their plane touches down.

"But I understand my iPhone, and I don't have to learn it, because it's learned me."

Your phone "learned" you? Really? Someone with an iPhone, please enlighten me.

"But let's admit amongst ourselves that the overwhelming majority of people out there have never pulled the battery out of their existing laptops, and didn't even know or care that it comes out."

Which means that they weren't complaining that it could come out. Don't fix it if it ain't broke. By that logic, I guess Lotus should make it so that you can't change your oil. Judging from your mechanical skills (it's called a bolt-on because it bolts right on), you were gonna take it to the dealership anyway, right?

That said, I don't think the Air is worthless, just worthless for people who view their laptop as a tool rather than an accessory.

<comment><USER11> "I'm sure an executive doesn't think it's cool that the battery's going to die on them before their plane touches down."

poor argument. 5 hours battery life on the MB air is more than most Dells would last on 2 batteries.

"just worthless for people who view their laptop as a tool rather than an accessory"

lets see, what have I plugged into my MB pro in the last 6 months....

1\. DVI 2\. Power 3\. Headphones 4\. USB Harddrive 5\. Digital camera

Basically nothing I couldn't have also plugged in on the MB Air. (never had to plug in my camera and usb drive simultaneously). Also, I haven't put a CD in my computer since I installed Leopard, so not having a CD drive is hardly much of an inconvenience.

I liked this article because it called out all the FUD tactics that the Macbook Air haters are raging on about for no reason.

<comment><USER10> Read arstechnica's review, they didn't get even get 3 hours, much less 5. They got worse battery life than from a regular Macbook and noted that it takes twice as long for the battery to charge than to discharge. In fact, an entire section of their review is titled "Battery Life, I Miss You". Does that sound appealing?

When I say accessory, I mean that some people don't NEED to be able to pull out their notebook at any given time to do something important. Not everybody does, but those would be the people that view it as an "accessory". It's cool that they have it, but I hope their ability to get work done is not solely dependent on it.

Like I said, I like the Air, but it seems to only be perfect for people who don't actually NEED it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'd triple bury this story if I could. He's like a "patriot" saying you shouldn't criticize the government.

</comment><comment><USER13> How about a work safe edit on the title?

</comment><comment><USER14> Ah, Wil Shipley -- the original Fake Steve Jobs.

</comment><comment><USER15> This rather belongs on digg.

</comment><comment><USER16> just unnecessary</comment>


The Silent Type: On Ulysses S. Grant - <AUTHOR> http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/05/24/ulysses-grant-silent-type/ <comment><USER2> I always felt that Grant's accomplishments had been given short shrift. Only in America could a man with multiple failures in life rise to greatness.

But someone that I'd like to see reevaluated by historians is Grant's friend William Sherman. Here's a reluctant warrior, running a Louisiana military academy and accepting of slavery. But when asked to turn against his country he resigned. He then met with President Lincoln and considered him hopelessly naive about what was to come.

But when he did engage he excelled. Along the way he suffered a mental breakdown only to come back to command. When his friend Grant tasked him with conquering Atlanta and then marching North to attack Gen Lee's flank he became a legend.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tecumseh_Sherman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tecumseh_Sherman)

<comment><USER3> My favorite little factoid that I gleaned from reading Grant's memoirs last summer was that his goal in young adulthood was to move to Northern California and become a math professor. [1] It felt strangely anachronistic and also completely changed my perception of his personality.

[1] Went ahead and dug up the quotes in his memoirs to fact check myself on this. Here's one: "My idea then was to... obtain a permanent position as professor in some respectable college; but circumstances always did shape my course different from my plans." And then a bit later: "I left the Pacific coast very much attached to it, and with the full expectation of making it my future home."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Now THAT is how to write a book report. I'm pretty sure I already own Grant's memoirs, but this review makes me think I need to own the newly annotated one as well. Outstanding.</comment>


Review: Apple MacBook Pro (2018, 15-inch) - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/review/apple-macbook-pro-2018/ <comment><USER2> I for one will be moving away from Macbooks when the time comes. As a developer I can no longer justify such an oppressive attitude toward a line of computers meant for serious professionals. These laptops are more a fashion and status symbol than ever, rather than the dynamic powerhouse we need them to be. They were great computers, but unfortunantly not so dynamic anymore and I philosophically do not agree with Apple any longer.

In a couple of years I'll be moving to a Linux setup, I only hope that the offerings at that stage are a little more 'complete'.</comment>


How casinos distract - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ketyov.com/2012/02/how-casinos-distract.html <comment><USER4> Also, when you go to a Casino that is on the ground level, there will be more escalators going down than going up.

The music they incessantly play in the background has sounds vaguely like a slot machine paying out.

Casinos are among the worst examples of an artificial environment to control behavior. It really is like a zoo. Makes museums that force exiting through the gift shop look benign.

As someone with an addictive personality, I find it shocking how casinos are so inclusive when it comes to sucking people in. All races, all ages (especially seniors). All focused on their game with an intensity that I wonder if they exhibit in their regular lives.

While I've been lucky enough (once or twice) to experience the rush of winning several hundred dollars at blackjack in the space of 20 minutes (it really is a surreal/joyous experience - you feel like everyone is cheering you on - <USER2> a celebrity almost), I'd rather avoid casinos than to get sucked into the vortex.

<comment><USER5> > _it really is a surreal/joyous experience - you feel like everyone is > cheering you on - like a celebrity almost_

I can't be the only one who finds that annoying? When I'm in a casino in London that's one of the things that limits how much I bet on a hand, the fact that I don't want to be a spectacle - many times I've played big enough hands that a small crowd will form to watch even if I'm alone on a table... and it's just a little weird in my opinion.

edit: Weird from my point of view, not weird that they do it - I too enjoy watching over the shoulder of people as they play.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Slot machines use a bunch of interesting psychological techniques. They are set up to produce "near misses", where the reels show you almost win, with the winning symbol just below the pay line. They create losses that appear as wins - you win less than you put in, so it feels like a win even though you lost money. They use a mapping so the odds of a reel stopping on something good are less than its physical fraction of the reel. They produce an illusion of control, since pushing the stop button has no effect on the result.

This all comes from a research paper: [http://www.nh.gov/gsc/calendar/documents/20091117_harrigan_d...](http://www.nh.gov/gsc/calendar/documents/20091117_harrigan_dixon.pdf)

<comment><USER7> The worst part is that no matter how much you know that this is the case, it can be exceptionally hard not to be taken in by that "man, I was thiiiis close" feeling. I'd throw the famous Wargames quote in here, and not playing is, for me, definitely the only time I "win", but instead I'll quote everyone's favorite philosophical physicists:

"So I started betting, and right away I lost five dollars in succession — one, two, three, four, five. I was supposed to be out only seven cents; instead, I was five dollars behind! I've never gambled since then (with my own money, that is). I'm very lucky that I started off losing."

Back to the idea of near misses, I spent an afternoon reading webpages like this one...

<http://wizardofodds.com/games/slots/appendix/2/>

...which show with charts how the "near miss" effect works. I then went ahead and blew the $20 that was in my pocket the next time I was in a casino for a buffet dinner. I play games that I enjoy, with the licenses, all the lights and sounds and big numbers and terrible payouts. I have some fun losing, but never as much fun as I'd have with 1/4th the money if I just took it down the street to the Pinball Hall of Fame arcade.

<comment><USER8> I love that you don't even name him, but have faith that the vast majority of the readers here know exactly who you mean.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The sensory overload both attracts an audience to the spectacle, and interrupts normal rational thinking. A double win!

But, interestingly, you can see the place differently if you change the 'soundtrack'. If you're in Las Vegas and have a good set of ear-sealing headphones – for example rubber earbuds – try listening to your own choice of music while strolling around. It creates sufficient detachment to let you view things as if with new eyes, and a slightly clearer mind. It's not quite the glasses from 'They Live' – but close.

<comment><USER10> One thing I suspect that is missing in both the above assessment and the article is that if you interrupt normal thinking with overload, and you force focus on something, you get the beginnings of a hypnotic, or at least quasi- hypnotic state. That state is familiar in computer games, and it is the same thing I see in casinos (disclaimer: I haven't spent any significant time gambling in them but some do have good food!).

Bright lights, flashing lights, disruptive sounds you have to tune out.... It narrows your sense of reality just as say a computer game does, and that also helps ensure that people play suboptimally.

I am less convinced by the color scheme arguments, since colors associations are extremely culturally bound.

<comment><USER11> _I am less convinced by the color scheme arguments, since colors associations are extremely culturally bound._

My thoughts too. Looks like the color choices in that color wheel are arbitrary. I tried searching for information on why the colors in that wheel are associated with the emotions the way they are, but couldn't find any.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was a little disappointed in this article, I thought the author set himself up for a really good piece, then started building up the ideas, then... ended, when I was expecting much more in terms of actual ideas.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is interesting… but I admit I found it a bit odd that point 1 was about "how round everything is on the casino floor", directly followed by an example of the Venetian's color scheme complete with a photo example showing not a single round feature...

This is a very interesting subject, perhaps worthy of a more scientific study.

<comment><USER13> In the text it said he switched out that image from the original venetian to the casino ventian, so maybe you saw the old version. In this one, I counted 16 circles/round objects if you include the archways in the doorway.

<comment><USER12> Yep, he certainly did switch out the image.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I went to Vegas in November last year, it was my first time and I am too young to gamble -- doesn't interest me anyway and I was there for work -- so although casinos were an interesting experience they had no real value to me. Anyway, on my last day I had some time to spend before my flight home so I (with 2 others) went to meet a friend who was staying in a different hotel on the other side of the strip. The instructions we had were simple, take one shuttle then another and you'll be there, sounds fine to me... but it wasn't. We spent at least 30 minutes walking through casino after casino, instead of there being a straight path from casino entrance to casino exit we had to snake our way through a maze of slot machines and attractions, it was probably the most agitating experience of my life. We had a clear goal, get from one hotel to the other, but the entire journey was one big upsell: "look at this machine wouldn't you like to put a dollar in, maybe you'll get two back!" and that drove me crazy. As someone who can only cope with structure and logic and things being well defined it was a horrible experience, having a vague idea of where I'm going with things constantly trying to grab my attention sucked. Worthless story but stuck with me and vaguely related to the article.

</comment><comment><USER15> Enough people know of these techniques that there are now casinos that are aimed at the crowd who are sick of the standard type of casino. An example is Encore in Vegas - floor to ceiling windows, clocks, no cheap funny business, etc.(if you ever go to Vegas I recommend it thoroughly)

So there is a business in not being like the other businesses.

</comment><comment><USER16> NPR's Planet Money did an interview with Gary Loveman who used to be an economics professor at Harvard Business School and now runs Ceasars Entertainment Corporation.

He describes some of the stuff they actually do: [http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/11/15/142366953/the- tues...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/11/15/142366953/the-tuesday- podcast-from-harvard-economist-to-casino-ceo)

Gave me a more positive view of casinos as Gary Loveman comes off as seeing himself in the business of selling customers "having a good time" and works hard to ensure that his customers leave the casino feeling they indeed had, which may require e.g. giving gift cards or similar to customers who are on a losing streak.

</comment><comment><USER17> Last time (and only time) I was in Vegas all I could see is decrepitude and sadness. One incident that stuck with me was how an old man had a heart attack ( I am guessing ) while playing coin slots. The ambulance came and took him away. Not sure why but that just seemed so sad to me.

<comment><USER18> I share your sentiment. I moved my first software company (now defunct) to Reno, NV from California in 2002, in what seemed like an unmitigated financial success. For the price of a decrepit office in the Bay Area, we could rent a huge McMansion with a view, offices upstairs, full kitchen, three bathrooms with showers, various rooms for meetings or storage or indoor ballgames, and ten minutes drive away from anything... What I failed to factor in was the profoundly depressing nature of every day seeing senior citizens in wheelchairs with oxygen tanks robotically pulling levers on slot machines or feeding money into video poker. Even if you avoid the casinos, you see it at the gas station, supermarket, etc... It's grotesque, but somehow when it's old people spending the last remaining days of their lives doing it, it becomes profoundly sad. Even more so to think that some poor old sucker spent literally the last day of his life that way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Thats quite a nice article! Wonder how this could be related to startups (e.g. how to optimally design your website to "hook people")?

I am sure a lot of the game companies (Zynga, online poker etc) are all over this!

Also reminds me a little of this awesome Reddit interview as well (the guy explains how data driven the online game companies are and its quite awesome and scary); [http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/pc6j9/iama_former_full...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/pc6j9/iama_former_fulltime_zynga_engineer_quit_6_months/)

Lastly it also reminds me of this article from a few days ago illustrates what crazy (but profitable) things you can do with data/behaviour/trend analysis (how the Target shops target you advertising); [http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how- targe...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target- figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/)

<comment><USER9> Zynga continues a long tradition of gambling/addiction innovation in San Francisco, going back at least to the invention of the slot machine by Charles Fey in ~1895:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slot_machine#History>

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> An interesting article.

Some of those things are mentioned in the classic hacker book "The Newtonian Casino"

([http://www.amazon.co.uk/Newtonian-Casino-Penguin-Press- Scien...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Newtonian-Casino-Penguin-Press- Science/dp/0140145931/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1329634178&sr=1-3))

</comment><comment><USER21> "There's a well-known study by Shiv and Fedorikhin showing that if you tax people's working memory by making them remember a 7-digit string of numbers, people are more likely to make a less-optimal decision (they chose to eat chocolate cake versus the more healthy fruit salad option)."

I'm not sure how the Shiv experiment proves anything. I personally would always choose the chocolate cake, no matter how much time I had to spend on the decision - I just _don't like_ fruit salads, at least not as much as cakes. And one doesn't eat desserts all the time, so it's not much of a problem anyway. 'Optimal' != 'healthy', and I bet (pun intended) that when choosing dessert many people optimize for feeling, not for health.

(Maybe this effect was documented using some other experiments, but sometimes when I read psychology stuff, I start do doubt both my and researchers' sanity, because I can't figure out how little shifts of behavior over e.g. a chocolate cake, tested on a small (< 1k) sample are really giving us any valuable insight, and are not just random noise)

<comment><USER22> If we can't give peer-reviewed, easily repeatable experiments the benefit of the doubt, we are in trouble.

<comment><USER21> I'd love to, but in case of psychology, many of them (or, conclusions drawn from them) just sound plain nonsense.

EDIT: I'm searching for original paper on Shiv experiment. It might be that cognitive load makes our decision less rational, but I'm not buying choosing salad over cake as a rationality test.

EDIT2: Found it.

[http://www.mendeley.com/research/heart-and-mind-in- conflict-...](http://www.mendeley.com/research/heart-and-mind-in-conflict-the- interplay-of-affect-and-cognition-in-consumer-decision-making/#page-1)

It seems that they also asked people to rate the rationality of their choice - whether they believe the cake/salad is good for health, a wise choice, etc. Given this data the result and conclusions sound a bit more reasonable.

I try to trust peer reviewed papers (if we can't trust them, what can we trust?), but I also try to keep my bullshit meter well calibrated. There's enough of pseudo-scientific "knowledge" circulating around. Just look at 7-38-55 (spoken-voice-body language) "rule of communication" and 'cone of learning' ("we remember 10% of what we read, 20% of what we hear, ...") - <USER3> gets repeated around all the time, but if you think of it, it makes no sense. And, in fact, it's totally not true. It's just a result of a big misinterpretation of some scientific studies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I was born and raised in Las Vegas. Actually, my family goes back to the '30's there. Some of the strategies mentioned in the article are a bit more complex than I've thought about, but are unsurprising. I've noticed more basic things like the round and meandering layout of casinos that make you (a) walk past the gaming areas to get anywhere and (b) make it difficult to navigate your way out of the gaming areas. Other techniques are the minimizing of natural light and absence of clocks so as not to remind people how much time is going by. This is all in addition to the inherent addictive nature of gambling. They've shown that rats in a cage, when presented with a lever that randomly delivers food when activated, will begin to obsessively trigger the lever and let the food pile up rather than hitting it only when they are hungry. In fact, B.F. Skinner, the father of behaviorist thought wrote a somewhat tongue in cheek paper in which he postulated that the gambling drive is so powerful that we could easily abolish all mandatory taxes if we instead encouraged people at a young age to gamble (on lotteries, etc.) - we'd have all the tax revenue we'd need.

I don't think most of these more exotic strategies (i.e. other than gaming itself and alcohol) were consciously employed when organized crime ran the industry. They made so much money skimming profits that they weren't too worried about squeezing dimes out nor were they sophisticated in that way (they were very sophisticated in other ways). In that time, the culture was marked by personal relationships (who you know), "comping" or giving free things, cheap rooms and food, more live entertainment, more well dressed adults going out at night rather than people walking the strip in the day pushing strollers, etc. Also there was a notable lack of violent crime in and around the casino areas. Organized crime wouldn't allow purse snatchers, card cheats, etc. (Of course I mean other than the crime committed by the mafia in enforcing this peace or crime among themselves).

This all changed as corporations began to run things and the mafia became more marginalized beginning in the '90's. The corporation's spreadsheet toting MBA's began calculating profitability on a per-square-foot basis. This resulted in less comping, more expensive food and hotel rooms, live entertainment replaced with more video poker, and many of the more esoteric strategies to induce gaming profits such as those mentioned in the article. It also resulted in some notable failures - for example the idea of appealing to families by adding huge kids rides and carnival style game areas. (This idea was taken from the Circus Circus Hotel which was the first to have that.) The idea kind of flopped and the hotels realized that people with kids don't spend 16 hours at a blackjack table (shocker). A spectacular example of this was the theme park behind the MGM that they eventually tore down. They shifted back to gaming and adult entertainment launching the "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" campaign and we saw the rise of casinos like the Palms that appealed to young men trying to relive the cool sophistication of Hugh Hefner's days in the '60s.

</comment><comment><USER24> I work in a small casino in Canada and I bet I could put a slot machine in a giant room with nothing else in it and people would still play it.

But there has to be money involved nobody will play if money can't be won, it's not the slot machine or deck of cards it's the gambling.

<comment><USER25> _But there has to be money involved nobody will play if money can't be won_

Zynga Texas Hold'Em seems to be a fairly definitive disproof by counterexample here. (For that matter, a _lot_ of MMORPGs/social games/etc use gambling mechanics and psychology without any monetary reward for winning the game.)

<comment><USER24> Before I worked in a casino and before regulations changed to allow them my uncle had "grey area" slot machines which didn't spit out anything but points added up on an on-screen counter.

Occasionally you would get people would spend too much and need help, the same for alcohol some people just can't regulate their vices. But anyway, my uncle offered to take a slot machine to their house set it up so they could play all they wanted without cost, or gain! Nobody he offered that to wanted to play without winning.

As for the "non-gaming" i.e. not casino type games, such as the MMOROGs/social games I would say players are aware before they play no money is won (unless there are side bets) but levels are status are probably just as valuable to them. Even with slots I have seen people trying to win the jackpot which may be $500 yet spend weeks trying to get it spending 100x that amount, or a bonus pot/progressive which may be almost nothing; it's not so much the money as it is the feeling but with slots it doesn't pay out in feelings only money.

For all of those examples I always think of an article I read about the US military where soldiers in WWI and WWII were not shooting at the enemy, soldiers were frozen with fear. So a system was created where the soldiers were trained to shoot at a target that popped up and when hit it would fall down. The response was to shoot and when hit the falling target was the reward and it got to the point the soldier would shoot it without thought more instinct. This training is called "Stimulus Response Reward" and I think gambling as well as any repetitive system seems to condition people to act, add to that genetic predisposition of gamblers to gamble on top of SRS.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What sites do you block from your search results? - <AUTHOR>

The web is filled with content farms that tailor their content purely for SEO and advertising.<p>What sites do you block from your results and why? <comment><AUTHOR> I block: w3schools.com, I think it's fairly well publicised why these guys aren't a good resource.

about.com, I dont like getting my results from content farms, and these guys seem to show up for almost everything.</comment>


Google Brain's Magenta: Multi-Style Image Transfer with Code - <AUTHOR> https://magenta.tensorflow.org/2016/11/01/multistyle-pastiche-generator/ <comment><USER2> As an artist I find it very frustrating when people try to apply style transfer type techniques in an attempt to emulate an artist like Picasso. It kinda works and generates a bunch of hype but it isn't even close. The reason it's frustrating is because I think Deep Learning is _actually_ capable of doing this stuff but the people implementing need to understand how Picasso actually did his work.

If you look at cubism the whole idea is to capture multiple sides of a 3-Dimensional object at once. A lot of art is not a "style" but rather a projection from 3D (or 4D) space to 2D space.

If you wanted to paint a "dog" in the style of Picasso your network would need to understand the geometry of a dog.

Training on a bunch of 2D before and after training examples is underspecified.

It's important to understand that it is a mapping from 3D -> 2D ... _NOT_ 2D->2D

Another example is "Nude Descending a Staircase" by Duchamp: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nude_Descending_a_Staircase,_N...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nude_Descending_a_Staircase,_No._2)

It is a painting describing motion. To apply style transfer would be completely stupid because the point of the image is to project 4D->2D ... not to have wavy black and brown lines.

<comment><USER3> To translate that kind of conceptual aesthetic logic into an algorithm, the programmer essentially needs to become the artist: make subjective creative decisions about the style to achieve, and enshrine those into code. And (as dmreedy wrote in a sibling comment) that's specifically the kind of "old- school" AI approach the current DNN-based work is trying to avoid.

I'm not as optimistic as you that the current statistics-driven approaches could ever reach the kind of deep analytic modeling that would be required for a style transfer system to be able to look at a Picasso and infer that there's a 3D->2D mapping at play... And it's a very interesting thought because (to me) it seems to demonstrate how far we are from actual AI that could make that kind of inventive conceptual leap.

<comment><USER2> What data does an artist consider when he paints? He does sort of an optimization procedure very similar to what something like Deep Dream does. But rather than doing response optimization to make random-noise more "dog- like" or "cat-like" or "human-like" (as Deep Dream does) the optimization is done to evoke a certain feeling within the artist himself. To create more extreme feelings than just a photo-realistic rendering.

The mapping between feeling and images are correlated to each other through experience. Certain images are fundamental to human experience and the human brain through evolution( a mother smiling, scary monsters). Others are learned (ever been hit by a car? bet that every time you see that exact model and color of car you'll feel an emotion)

Here's a thought experiment:

What if we fed the deep learning "painter" tons of 3D animation. Each point in time would be a full 3D Scene. Each point in time would be labelled with emotions "scary", "happy" , "angry"

I bet the algorithm could generate original art and learn new artistic styles by maximizing response to certain permutations of feelings.

<comment><USER4> Learning from video is researched in many papers. The way video data is structured, it allows for identification of new objects by comparing consecutive frames. It creates a "model of the physical world" that can predict the future a few time steps ahead. It is being used to identify activities and to help plan robotic movements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why is everyone working on style transfer? It doesn't seem like such an interesting problem in the field, compared to things like speech recognition for example. Is it just because it's a "cracked" problem and it looks nice? I'm just genuinely curious here, not trying to bash the amazing work these people do.

<comment><USER6> Because it's a way to avoid confronting the increasingly unavoidable fact that the AI renaissance DNNs were supposed to usher in is looking increasingly less impressive. Unsurprising, given that throwing more computing power at neural networks doesn't constitute a fundamental leap forward -- but disconcerting to a community that expected, and promised, far more than is being delivered.

<comment><USER7> Hold on a second. We're still in the very, very early stages here. We haven't even started to connect those networks together to make hierarchies.

You're speaking like someone watching the Wright brothers testing some of their earliest models, and going "supersonic flight my ass, you guys can't even fly across this football field".

<comment><USER8> > We haven't even started to connect those networks together to make > hierarchies.

What's stopping us at this point?

<comment><USER9> Nothing, but it might not be the right approach.

We didn't progress from the wright flyer by stacking more and more wings on. (Although that path was explored for a couple decades)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not sure how related this is but seems like the right crowd to ask...

As a photographer who also does programming full time I've been wondering what would need to happen to synthesize skin texture to remove imperfections. Example, removing small scars, wrinkles, etc. Currently I just use the healing brush in Photoshop but wondering if ML can be used to automatically do it.

Does anyone have any recommendations on what sub-fields or papers I could read to get a better idea of what would be involved to create a solution like that?

<comment><USER11> Sounds like a problem for inpainting.

Here's a paper around synthesizing human faces. It includes inpainting [http://www.faculty.idc.ac.il/arik/seminar2009/papers/VisioFa...](http://www.faculty.idc.ac.il/arik/seminar2009/papers/VisioFaces.pdf)

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.07379.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.07379.pdf) this uses a GAN to inpaint with arbitrary data. This is probably a couple of iterations from being easy to implement, as training GANs efficiently and accurately is still a technical challenge.</comment></comment>


'Silk Road' Was Safer Than the Streets for Buyers/Sellers - <AUTHOR> http://www.drugpolicy.org/blog/silk-road-was-safer-streets-buyerssellers <comment><USER2> Ordering multiple murders = safe? Oooookay.</comment>


Orisi – An open-source framework for Bitcoin smart contracts - <AUTHOR> http://orisi.org/about

<comment><USER2> The project is on hold since a year ago, but here's a link to the whitepaper if anyone's interested: [https://github.com/orisi/wiki/wiki/Orisi-White- Paper](https://github.com/orisi/wiki/wiki/Orisi-White-Paper)

If anyone has any questions feel free to ask here.

</comment><comment><USER3> As an abstract idea / bitcoin experiment this is cool. As a company this is a disaster.

Its amazing you can fund a company these days with a statement like "the business model is yet to be discovered - we'll probably provide paid-for oracle hosting services, or launch/invest in some smart contracts ourselves."

That basically is a business model of "we have no business model or intention of ever making any money - if people stop giving us money perhaps we can host a virtual yard sale - btw bitcoin is cool!!!!!

A three person team of SEO consultants think there is so much value in their understanding of an open source codebase they can somehow turn that into a business because bitcoin - lol.

<comment><USER2> Why the hate?

The project was self-funded from previous successful ventures. That answers your first question.

As for the "SEO consultants" \- neither one of us does consulting work, so I don't know where you got that either. We're all quite technical actually.

<comment><USER3> I am not hating - I am just giving my opinion based on what I read on the first page. I guess SEO engineers is a better way to describe your work (tbh like many people SEO is a killer word that stops my attention i did not click through too see this was a tool not a consultancy) so I apologise for that.

So what is the current status of the project? it seems like you have not done anything for a year on the project but now it got submitted to HN? Bitcoin must have changed a lot in that time so i guess this is already a dead business just a cool project idea?

<comment><USER2> It was a project idea, with some novel concepts introduced in our Whitepaper ( [https://github.com/orisi/wiki/wiki/Orisi-White- Paper](https://github.com/orisi/wiki/wiki/Orisi-White-Paper) ). The bitcoin community changed a bit, but the fundamentals haven't and the concept we introduced is still awaiting a proper implementation.

Why it got submitted - I don't know who did it, it was neither one of us! But it's nice to see that someone's still interested in what you did.

One thing that I really should do is some kind of closure & public after action review...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4>
      "Create your own contract in 29 easy steps"

yikes, that's a lot of steps... isn't this supposed to simplify that?

<comment><USER2> "easy" was an irony here :) The goal of the project was to allow those things in the first place.

Simplifying deployment would be step #2 after the whole architecture was completed.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does a college degree hold more power than a strong portfolio? - <AUTHOR> When I got into the web development business there were no college degrees for it, just CS at the time. Times have changed and if someone were to get into the business right now, straight out of high school, with a strong portfolio of work would they have a better shot at a job than a college grad with only the examples that they did in class? <comment><USER2> I've hired a lot of people who didnt finish their degree, but had some college under their belt and a strong portfolio. I would have a very hard time hiring a HS graduate, unless they expressed a very high level of maturity, and even then, I would not pile a lot of responsibility on them for quite a while.

Problem is, college is synonymous with gaining maturity, since for many, its the first time they're truly on their own. Responsible for their own grades, responsible for day to day life, responsible for projects and outcomes. Being able to handle your life, handle deadlines, not think you can boil the ocean - is very important for me as a manager. Having a bit of higher education under your belt gives me a warm fuzzy feeling (maybe wrongfully so) that you can hack it in the real world.

There are exceptions, but the stereotypes do fit most of the time.

<comment><USER3> > Problem is, college is synonymous with gaining maturity, since for many, its > the first time they're truly on their own. Responsible for their own grades, > responsible for day to day life, responsible for projects and outcomes. > Being able to handle your life, handle deadlines, not think you can boil the > ocean - is very important for me as a manager.

Do you think someone who had a career at that age had less or more responsibility than someone in college?

<comment><USER2> Valid point, but generally speaking, I was looking for someone who was a bit more mature than straight out of Highschool - and college gave me some concept that they'd achieved that.

Hiring right out of HS would have been a higher risk in my mind

<comment><USER3> I see what you're saying and think we were at different ends: I thought you meant 'I wouldn't hire someone who only graduated HS' rather than 'I wouldn't hire someone who just graduated HS' and fair enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's my recommendation: you aren't going to make much money without solid references. A portfolio is mostly meaningless. What you want are references.

But the market is strong right now for developers.

So, rather than racking up a bunch of debt, why not finish your BS in CompSci at a state school part-time while working full time?

You'll be getting real, hands-on experience through your work, and buttressing your non-CS skill set as well as your non-practical CS skills. Financially, you'll be making decent enough money that you should be able to afford to live comfortably and pay for school as you go (depending what state you live in). I know it's possible because I recently did the number's for a friend of mine's younger brother who is in the same boat. He lives in Minnesota. YMMV in other regions.

After, say, 6 years, you should be able to have a CS degree and 6 years of experience, plus references.

With that, you should be able to make great money _and_ be well positioned for when the market isn't so good for developers.

A lot my friends in the 90s who dropped out of their CS degrees because the market was hot had to either leave the industry, take massive pay cuts, or go back to school and take on a lot of debt when the market crashed. When nobody is hiring but the big boys, college degrees are the price of admission, even for shit jobs.

<comment><USER5> this was a better answer than mine. kudos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A strong portfolio is far better than a degree most of the time. That said, IMO a recent high school graduate would have a much harder time proving that their portfolio is strong and that they are worth the risk over a college new grad.

There are some high schools in the US (probably other places too) though that have specific programs where their students are coming out highly trained and with solid skills. My son is coming out of one next year, and while he is planning to go to college as it stands right now, he is employable today. I have used him as a junior developer on a few of our consulting projects in the past couple of years as he can produce and do the basics. I am also potentially going to hire 1 or 2 of his classmates as interns over the summer because we have some temporary needs for basic HTML/CSS skills and to your point they get to build a portfolio on real projects and products.

</comment><comment><USER7> A college degree is important to many kinds of places, such as government contractors who are obligated to have all of their engineers with degrees. Generally the bigger an employer is, the more likely you're going to need a degree. If you want to write software for Lockheed or McDonnel Douglas you need a degree.

In the context of software development, the most important thing you can get from a degree that you won't get from independent learning is the people connections. If you're wanting to start your own business and you've been living in a social cave for the last 5 years, you're at a significant disadvantage compared to someone who has spent the last several years rubbing elbows with the best brightest and best-connected people at Stanford.

On the other hand, you're going to spend years studying things that may or may not seem relevant to you, when you could be learning and building things of direct impact this month.

Most employers worth working for today want to see that you can do the job effectively, and you can demonstrate that with a killer portfolio and excellent interviewing skills.

I went straight into the software industry out of high school. Well, technically before-- I got my first programming job at 16. I've never had trouble finding employment except for a brief period at the end of the dot com collapse in 2001. But not having a degree has always limited my options. Almost all jobs 20 years ago stated they require a degree, and they meant it. Today it's a small minority of jobs that state that they require a degree and actually mean it.

The importance of a degree on paper is waning, and has been for some time. But the importance of knowing a bunch of people who know how to do lots of things, and have capitial: that is still vitally important. And a good university is a great way for a young person to get access to those things, but not the only way.

<comment><USER8> > write software for ... McDonnel Douglas you need a degree

And a time machine. ;)

I agree in general with your post, though. Software development is a big field, and some corners absolutely require a relevant degree for actual or bureaucratic purposes. This is the case almost any time it intersects with traditional engineering, and in fact many of those jobs would rather have a $DISCIPLINE engineer who can code than a software engineer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Another way to look at it:

If I need to hire someone for a specific task, e.g. a web development specific job in a specific framework / language, I might prefer someone with "street smarts" and a proven portfolio vs a fresh Stanford CS graduate, yes.

If I need someone to work on algorithms, big data, analytics, machine learning, unless they are top of the line in Kaggle, or high rank in TopCoder et al, then a degree will be pretty important for me.

As for you, as I said in another too long to read comment. do you want to be that first guy that will always need to learn the hot new framework, grunt + angular today, gulp + react tomorrow, you always have to keep up to be relevant.

When you have a degree you still need to stay up to speed and be relevant, but at least you have some fallback. It will be easier to find a job for a 45 years old person that had a CS degree and had all his career worked on a mainframe as a mediocre mainframe developer, than for a "once guru mainframe developer that used to speak in conferences and got to be on the front page of the printed edition of mainframe monthly" but with no CS degree.

Also if you would like to get into the "big ones" (Google / Facebook etc...) it will really help to have a degree. You'll need a really impressive portfolio to be noticed without a degree. And you also need to know all that CS theory to get passed their technical questions.

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't know how much value I would place on a degree in "web development" because it would raise the question: Where are the gaps that would have been covered in a CS or Software Engineering curriculum but weren't? I don't think that the issues that exist in web development are the generalized cases of a narrower set of CS or SE problems.

<comment><USER11> Even if you're hiring for a Web Developer?

<comment><USER12> For sure. I view vocational style degrees like "Web Development" as a red flag. My thinking is that the program is probably a bullshit money grab, and the person who went there is naive enough to go for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's always tricky to generalize, but when I'm hiring I value a great portfolio much _much_ more than a degree.

But I think you'd have a hard time getting that first job with no college degree. Someone's gotta take a chance. Once you've got a few years of job experience (at least to me) the lack of a degree is not important.

I personally think people should go to college, though, if they are able. I think there's a lot of value in the social experience and in taking classes that are NOT just teaching job skills. I've hired some really fanstastic developers who were humanities majors.

</comment><comment><USER13> As a hiring manager, here's how my impressions rank:

1\. Strong portfolio + CS degree 2\. Strong portfolio 3\. CS degree 4\. "web development" degree

I would almost never hire someone who got a degree in IT or "web development." Academics shouldn't be purely vocational, and it would raise serious questions for me of why you couldn't complete a normal CS degree.

<comment><USER14> This is where I'm at. ("Game development" degrees are a similar question mark in that field, too.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I got into web dev before web dev degrees existed also. at the time a strong portfolio was certainly more than enough.

however, I'm talking about a time where they would hire anybody who knew a smidgen of HTML. and I wasn't straight out of high school. I had spent some time in the world of work first, proving that I could meet deadlines and handle responsibilities as a production artist and graphic designer. and for that matter, I went to a high school which got profiled on CNN as "the Harvard of high schools." I was studying both Ancient Greek and Latin at the age of 15 or 16.

so, although I did it without a degree, and I've met plenty of great programmers without degrees, or whose degrees are in linguistics or philosophy or film, I would have to say, the responsible thing to tell a high school kid is that a degree is pretty damn useful.

also, web dev has picked up a staggering amount of complexity in the intervening decades. think of all the perspective you would gain if you were to fully investigate, for example, the convoluted history of MVC - from the GUI, to Rails, and then back to the GUI via the browser, where we now have to host a kind of recursive MVC. or imagine having to make sense of JavaScript without knowing that the "Java" in the name was a marketing gimmick from 1997.

yet at the same time, most CS degrees appear to suck anyway, and many CS degrees probably even do severe and active harm, insofar as they encourage the bizarre anti-intellectualism prevalent in STEM culture. you're more likely to avoid an unthinking contempt for English majors, for example, if you never had to find out what a major was in the first place.

so, like anything in tech, there's tradeoffs.

</comment><comment><USER15> Straight out of high school? Well, if they had the experience and portfolio for the job and won-out against the competition, sure. Just bear in mind, it's hard to shine when you're fresh out of high school.

At the end of the day though, if someone came to me with a CS degree and a weak portfolio, I probably wouldn't hire them over, say, someone with no degree but a strong one. I value the ability to learn on one's own time 100x more highly than the ability to learn in a classroom environment.

</comment><comment><USER16> Depends on who you're talking to. For some people, college is huge -- those also tend to be the people for whom Stanford, MIT, or Harvard counts more than ten degrees from a state school. For others what you've done will count for more.

 _Some_ degree is almost always preferable to no degree though. In some cases it need not be in the field you're working in.

</comment><comment><USER17> Remember that a College degree shows that you can stick at something for a couple of years and actually finsih it.

<comment><USER18> So can a similar 4 year run at a typical company. Especially smaller companies, many got from zero to acquisition in that person, or zero to release 2.0, which can be pretty significant.

Similarly many people get through college only showing that they can put in enough effort to evade detection in the sense of total failure.

I don't think completion of a degree alone is a significant indicator relative to alternative options.

<comment><USER19> I took the route of leaving college in my 2nd year. Several of my friends have recently graduated, and there is the typical fracturing of those truly passionate, those who just did the coursework, and those who didn't learn a damned thing. The thing about the last group is, they still managed to graduate with a degree. I'm not saying this to be a dick, but one of my best friends graduated with a BS in Computer Science, and he cannot even do FizzBuzz. He's not the only one I know like this. Say what you will about "sticking it out for 4 years", but when you filter based on a criteria that includes folks who can't do the most trivial problems, you might want to rethink your strategy.

Maybe my microcosm is not indicative of most places, but of the companies I've worked/applied to thus far, not having completed college has not been a hindrance. Especially once you've gotten a few solids years experience under your belt, if you're the type who is motivated and a solid developer, you should have no problem getting a good job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The work samples are key, whether they consist of previous work or of "the examples they did in class". If candidate A has a degree and a portfolio, they'll have an edge over candidate B who just has the portfolio. If A's class examples are crappy, and B's work examples are great, B will have the edge.

(You have a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem for candidate B, though, since if they've spent time building up a strong portfolio of work then by definition they are not "straight out of high school.")

What kind of degree matters too, though; a real CS degree from a real school is worth a lot more than certain for-profit institution's halfway-accredited "you too can be a real live web developer!" programs.

</comment><comment><USER21> Maybe? I think that hiring is one of those things that there are no hard and fast rules for. I've met super talented but completely irresponsible people that I'd never hire despite the amazing portfolio and I've met college grads with only there school work to show and it's pretty great, who turned out to be great hires. It's more about the individual person than a set of key words to determine success.

All that said I think it really depends on the market, tech stack the dev is aiming at, and particular companies that are targeting. I've had influence in hiring at 5 different companies and each has had a different policy in regards to a degree.

</comment><comment><USER22> When I hire, I don't care too much about a degree unless it is from a strong school - even then I still vet for technical skills.

But I only view degrees as upside, not part of the core decision making process for me when evaluating a candidate.

</comment><comment><USER23> Id happily take a chance on HS grad with a strong portfolio.

I think the issue here is where does a HS grad get the time to focus on building a strong portfolio? A strong portfolio is maybe 1500 hours of work, and includes projects undertaken as part of a team.

At a pace of 10 hours a week it would take a HS student almost three years to build a good enough portfolio. I'm sure some students could do this.... But it would take a lot of dedication.

</comment><comment><USER24> How can one expect to have a _strong_ portfolio of work "straight out of high school"? There simply hasn't been enough time to build a strong one. A few student projects or a part-time summer job is quite different from several years of web dev experience, which very few 18-year-olds have.

</comment><comment><USER25> I have a degree in Digital Art & Design, but I have interviewed for and gotten jobs looking for a CS background.

I am a web programmer. Design seems to be an acceptable background for coding positions. I think just having some degree is a key that will open doors. Then it's down to your skills to seal the deal.

</comment><comment><USER26> Interesting question. I would say it really depends on company/location. HR doesn't always have time to look at a portfolio and the first thing they usually see/expect on your resume/CV is college. I'd like to see some statistics on this.

</comment><comment><USER27> After the tough time I had trying to stay afloat in my undergrad, I don't think I'd venture to hire someone who was unable to complete a degree (just being honest with myself). I agree though that most actual learning occurs outside of the classroom.

</comment><comment><USER28> A good education shows the right data has been put into your brain. A good portfolio shows you can produce good output. I think/hope employers value the latter.

</comment><comment><USER29> > "When I got into the web development business there were no college degrees > for it, just CS at the time."

What specific field of study is this referring to?

<comment><USER30> I got a degree in "Computer Science and Media" which is essentially software engineering for web/mobile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I've taught web development at a university and I can tell you, a portfolio holds a lot, and by a lot I mean a hell of a lot, more value!

</comment><comment><USER32> Degrees show the ability to jump through hoops, which is beneficial in many organizations.

A portfolio shows aptitude.

The combination of both make for the strongest employees.

</comment><comment><USER33> We hire people who have internships and we promote internships in govt. IT. Degrees may not matter as much as projects completed.

</comment><comment><USER34> I have been in IT since 1995, and in my experience people with a BSCS have an easier time getting a job, and are usually working better jobs.

Some jobs say from the get-go they're unavailable to people without a Bachelors. Here is one:

[http://sfbay.craigslist.org/nby/sof/5058201264.html](http://sfbay.craigslist.org/nby/sof/5058201264.html)

"Bachelors in Engineering or CS is a minimum requirement."

Even if it's not a listed job requirement, some people like to see it anyhow. It doesn't matter as much when things are buzzing, but it becomes important during downturns like after 2000 or after 2008.

It is rare to meet someone without a BSCS who can explain what a finite state automata is, or how you can prove a problem is NP-complete through reductions, and that sort of thing. Or even with less theoretical topics, they're less likely to know what second normal form is, or semaphore P&V's etc.

Of course there are different scenarios and exceptions to every rule. Some people get a diploma while doing the minimum. Some people are superstars and learn theory without a diploma. People can get jobs without a diploma, especially in boom times.

I would go back again to the economic downturns. In 2000 a lot of companies went under and people were let go. The same happened in 2008. You might be laid off, and will then be competing for a very limited number of jobs against people with as much experience as you, plus diplomas. You might think it might not matter, and some other people might tell you that doesn't matter, but that won't be much help when you're laid off, have a family to support and mortgage to pay, and job listings say like the above ad "Bachelors...requirement". Or even if it the job listing doesn't have that as a requirement, HR is taken aback when you tell them you don't have a degree. You hear complaints about people over 40 or over 50 not being able to find work in the Valley, imagine being that age and not even having a Bachelors.

I can see someone, if they have to, working while going for their Bachelors. I can even see someone out of necessity cutting school down to one night/weekend class a week. For a young person to go into development without pursuing a Bachelors seems very risky to me. You'll be the first one thrown into the scrap heap when the economy sours, and by that time you might have a family to support. You don't want to have the realization you need a Bachelors when you're 35 with a family - between work, family and study you'll have no time at all.

</comment><comment><USER9> I see it this way: it's a choice between being mostly a craftsmen/engineer and being an applied scientist (that can also become a very good craftsmen/engineer).

If you want to limit yourself to jobs that need only concrete skills, specific knowledge (e.g. knowing an API of some framework inside or out, or even knowing the nits and grits of a specific programming language) then a strong portfolio, and self learning might be enough. Although you will always be looked down upon by CS college grad peers once big O and Algorithms / data structures discussions are coming up. Even if you know it better than them! (They just assume that you don't as you don't have a degree)

But the bigger downside if you truly choose to be solely a craftsmen is that you always have to keep up or your are out. Technologies change, and if you don't change with them, you are obsolete. Even if you know HTML5, CSS, JavaScript and Rails to the level you memorized them and have built an impressive portfolio with 2000 stars in GitHub and 10 HN front page submissions. Ask yourself where is that guy who did this 10 years ago? I was one of those, I had Flash stuff that was the equivalent to the above. Got Macromedia site of the day, people in forums and myspace praised my work, I got my work presented in FlashForward conferences. Does it worth anything now? zip, nada. think 10-15 years from now. will a starred github JQuery plugin you wrote get you that job when you are 35? 45? 55?

In the other hand, if you want transferable skills that are not framework related, you need to either self learn it, (which is hard to prove) or get a degree. the degree serves the following:

10% - the actual knowledge (you can get it anywhere), 40% - the self discipline structure that forces you to "self learn". think of it as a challenge, you pay tuition, they force you to stay focused and self learn by going to lectures / watching them online. 30% - is the easy verification that you know those things, instead of reading your portfolio and looking for usage of data structures / algorithms (e.g. anything that is not just "trade skills" or "craftsmanship", future employers can just see your degree, and assume (if you got a decent GPA and it's a decent university) that you got that at least covered. the last 20% is as others said - soft skills implied from graduating college. employers know that you can handle life on your own, handle deadlines, handle working with a team, handle pressure, and do something that is not immediate gratification.

You can always choose to also be a craftsman after you get your degree, in practice, specific technical skills are very important and valuable for employers.

If you don't want to limit the jobs you can apply for, you need to prove 2 things -

1) that you have your CS basics (Algorithms, Data Structures etc) otherwise you rule out many interesting jobs (not just at Google / Facebook, but also many web startups that need more than just CRUD / web / mobile)

2) that you can actually code and use that knowledge in a specific tech stack.

You can prove #2 easily by going the portfolio way. You make it harder to prove #1 by going the portfolio way, and make it easier by going the degree way.

p.s. you can get a CS top 10 US education for about $10,000

Step 1: get an accredited US CS undergrad degree online for $4,000 at [http://uopeople.edu](http://uopeople.edu)

Step 2: apply to Georgia Tech Online Master of Science (degree is the same as on-campus degree, which is ranked #9 in the US for Graduate Computer Science degree) and pay only about $6,600 and you don't need a GRE! (as opposed to the on campus one). you just need to get B and above in 2 core courses to be fully admitted (not always easy, but doable)

The amount of jobs you can do after that grows largely. And I think it will be a little more interesting than just doing the same old CRUD / Mobile / UI until you retire, and having to learn every 10 years or so a whole new paradigm.

Just think of all the build tools, frameworks that there are out there, you are a Grunt + Node + Angular guru today, tomorrow they will look for a Gulp + TypeScript + React guru, and in 10 years OO GUI building will make a comeback and people will return to writing UI using Swing / MFC like structure as you can run it natively in a browser using ASM.js.

I'm doing web since 2000, and the amount of technology changes is overwhelming, what is hype today, might not be even in existence 10-15 years from now.

Programming principles, (OO, Functional, Reactive etc) and basic CS stuff (Algorithms, Data Structures) will likely stay here a little longer. Although you always have to keep up there too, the pace is though, a little slower.

</comment><comment><USER35> Portfolio.</comment>


Last 48 hours in Kathmandu – a Mathematician's analysis of the earthquakes - <AUTHOR> http://younghamlet.blogspot.com/2015/04/attempt-at-some-words-of-calm-through.html

<comment><USER2> USGS Aftershock Forecast for the Magnitude 7.8 Nepal earthquake of April 25, 2015

(as of April 26, 2015) In the coming week, USGS expects 3-14 M≥5 aftershocks of the magnitude 7.8 Nepal earthquake. Additionally, USGS estimates that there is a 54% chance of a M≥6 aftershock, and a 7% chance of a M≥7 aftershock during this one-week period. After this, in the following month and then the following year, USGS expects several M≥5 aftershocks, with a significant chance of M≥6 aftershock (greater than 50%). The potential for an aftershock larger than the mainshock remains, but is small (1-2% in each time period).

Felt earthquakes (i.e., those with M≥ 3 or 4) will be common over the next weeks to months. Based on general earthquake statistics, the expected number of M≥ 3 or 4 aftershocks can be estimated by multiplying the expected number of M>=5 aftershocks by 100 or 10, respectively. The expected location of the aftershocks will be in the zone of current activity and at its edges. Currently aftershocks are occurring in a zone extending approximately 200 km away from the mainshock epicenter.

This information is preliminary and subject to change.

from [http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us20002926#...](http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us20002926#general_summary)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is not a great analysis, and is kind of confusing.

      Things will improve, the law of math promises it.

Ah well, if a mathematician says the law of math promises it!

See Omori's law (and Båth's Law and the Gutenberg–Richter law), and the roughly 5% chance that this quake was a foreshock for an even bigger quake ("the 2002 Sumatra earthquake is regarded as a foreshock of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake with a delay of more than two years between the two events")

<comment><USER4> Agreed. Earthquakes are extremly unpredictable, the best we have is the USGS models and even then they provide very little information.

In Christchurch, New Zealand the M6.3 aftershock in February 2011 was far more destructive than the initial M7.2 event that occured 5 months earlier. This was because the epicenter of the February aftershock was significantly closer to the city and populated areas.

Looking at the Nepal aftershock sequence map [1] it is a concern that many of the aftershocks are located closer to the populated areas. I really hope that Nepal has had the worst of it but it would be a mistake to rule out the possibility of another major event.

[1] [http://www.latimes.com/visuals/graphics/la-fg-g-nepal-map- qu...](http://www.latimes.com/visuals/graphics/la-fg-g-nepal-map-quakes-and- aftershocks-20150425-htmlstory.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The magnitude isn't everything, Christchurch NZ being a case in point. It's later, shallow earthquake caused much more destruction and killed many, while the bad initial quake killed no one directly. I'm no expert, but the magnitude of the quake is relative to the depth in a way that masks the actual destructive power.</comment>


Offer HN: I will build you a working MVP for $3000 - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I will build you a working MVP for $3000. I have 3 weeks' time at my disposal. Email me at firstname.lastname@example.com
Who am I?
I am full stack developer with prior startup experience (sole owner, successful exit by sale, but no big figures to brag about). I have major experience working in NodeJS, AngularJS and PHP. I have worked on a lot of projects involving heavy API usage. I know how to find my way in a documentation. I know how to deploy apps on linux environments. I can work with pretty much anything (working with the stack I know will be faster, obviously). I am okay at designing. I have built some nice interfaces, but none of them are artistic.
I am very open to learning new technologies, if you already have something going on, on a different stack.
What kind of products will I prefer?
Products that involve new tech (bitcoin, etc) and would optionally allow me to open source some of the work and build up my GitHub profile.
Why am I doing this?
I have been freelancing on and off, for 5 years now and

  - I have no projects to put in my portfolio.

  - My public GitHub profile is almost empty.
 I would like to do something about that.
Why do I have no projects to show in my portfolio?
Well, most of the work I have done is invisible. I have built scalable REST back-ends for mobile apps. I have built private web interfaces for large subscriber management systems. I recently built a product for someone working in a corporation. But the person abandoned the project citing financial issues and it was never launched out in the public.
Why is my GitHub profile empty?
I never felt the need to write something from scratch (thanks to the node community for such great modules) and I couldn't open source any of my clients' work. <comment><USER2> "most of the work I have done is invisible" -

1\. Yes, but you could mention the name of those mobile apps. 2\. You can ask your clients to mention your name in humans.txt

Just my 2 cents to make your case stronger.

</comment><comment><USER3> So do you have any examples of work you have done before?

Zubair Nemcv.com</comment>


Notchup invites - <AUTHOR>

I will give give out notchup invites to anyone that provides me their email address and first/last name. My email is troy dot simpson at gmail.
Full disclosure - this does get me a bonus if you get successfully get paid to go interview.  From their site "For each friend you invite, we'll pay you a bonus equal to 10% of what your friend earns on every interview they do for one year."
You get the benefit of not having to wait for them to review your eligibility. <comment><USER2> eval `my username`@$GOOGLE_MAIL</comment>


Data mining adds evidence that war is baked into the structure of society - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612704/data-mining-adds-evidence-that-war-is-baked-into-the-structure-of-society/ <comment><USER2> A good follow-on to this article is the classic paper, War is a Racket.

[https://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html](https://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html)</comment>


Tell HN: Take time off and spend time with loved ones - <AUTHOR>

Don't lose site of the people in life you care about. Take the weekend off and spend time with these people.<p>Just a friendly reminder. Happy holidays! <comment><USER2> Merry xmas, signing off until after new year :)</comment>


How Adobe Flash fell, and why Flash content is worth preserving - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/863467/how-adobe-flash-once-the-face-of-the-web-fell-to-the-brink-of-obscurity-and-why-its-worth-saving/ <comment><USER2> As someone who made a lot of games in Flash that would be difficult to port to HTML5, and a fan of a lot of old Flash content whose creators have pretty much disappeared nowadays, I would like to see more of an effort to preserve and archive these things.

There was a ton of cool creative content that came about thanks to Flash (and Newgrounds in particular). It'd be a shame to lose it all just because people now hate the technology they were built on.

<comment><USER3> I suppose the simplest thing to do would be for Adobe to produce a WebAssembly build of Flash player. Any old Flash content could be run via that without the need to install Flash on the system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow. that chart is misleading. They consider "No Digital Rights Information" to be a high risk factor. Bias much?

And it's not even correct, with plugins with PDFs. They can have DRM junk encrusted on them.

<comment><USER5> HTML is supported by only one vendor?

Which one? Firefox or Chromium-WebKit or Explorer?

<comment><USER6> WHATWG maybe?

Also HTML is apparently more complex than JPEG and MP3. I'll remember that next time I"m hand-coding some audio files and using a machine to generate HTML.

<comment><USER7> This chart is so nonesense. HTML is deprecated? Really? And how is having more versions a higher risk of obsolescence, but having /multiple specifications/ reduces risk?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Steve Jobs killed Flash by banishing it from iOS, and then WHATWG, the Chrome team [1], and Mozilla [2][3] started rushing to cram [4] all sorts of JS APIs into the web platform instead. Still, it took almost 5 years to catch HTML5 up to the capabilities provided by Flash [5] -- and that's if all vendors agree on which APIs to support [6]. Mobile Safari right now lags behind, which is not to the detriment of Apple: every developer wanting presence on iOS will adopt Apple's preferred workflow, and to date they have had no strong incentive to promote web-based apps, unlike their rivals Google and Mozilla.

Adobe tried to play it cool by pivoting to AIR, a Flash-to-Native generator, which luckily they already had. Meanwhile they put out a press release trying to position their upcoming tools as the preferred toolset for HTML5 production, but this mostly hasn't panned out.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12174503#12175561](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12174503#12175561) [2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12129691#12131403](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12129691#12131403) [3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12192509#12194161](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12192509#12194161) [4] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12129691#12135175](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12129691#12135175) [5] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12259435#12259940](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12259435#12259940) [6] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12758085#12760949](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12758085#12760949)

<comment><USER9> I liked flash a lot. But the problem with Adobe/Macromedia was they never gave it too much development time. It took a long time for flash to start using the GPU. It took a while for flash to start its way towards mobile, before abandoning mobile.

Flash could have been a platform that apps could have been built on and displayed in an app store, but they never promoted anything close to it. Flash could have been a complete browser, but they never cared. Flash could have been a cloud desktop (like Goowy Desktop [bought and shut by AOL]). Flash could have been an OS (like Chrome OS or Android OS). Flash was already a pretty good PDF reader and worked faster than Adobe PDF in the browser, but no one knew.

Flash had so much potential, but Macromedia did not have much money to invest and Adobe bought it without any imagination.

All efforts in Flash went to waste and set the industry 5-10 years behind ... so far behind that we now have to wait for HTML5 to be better ... slowly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> He forgot to mention that since it's closed source and Adobe isn't releasing a SFW converter, even the Internet Archive can't backup a copy of the sfw file and have it useful.

OpenOffice, OOTH, can be converted to HTML or PDF, and even if OO and LO go down, the engine will still be available.

<comment><USER8> The 'OpenOffice' format in the chart (SXW) is dates from OpenOffice 1.x [1], and was a transitional format between the old binary and the not-yet-developed ODF the same way that Microsoft Office 2003 shipped with an intermediate XML format that is similar but isn't compatible with what later became OOXML.

For all serious uses, ODF has long-ago replaced the SXW format.

[1] [https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/OOo3_User_Gui...](https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/OOo3_User_Guides/Getting_Started/File_formats)

<comment><USER5> True, but there (I hope, at least) is an old OpenOffice (at least in VS) where you can find a parser.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My internet browsing has been much more enjoyable as Flash has become less prevalent. I'm glad it's going away. I only wish it happened sooner.

</comment><comment><USER11> I thought this was a decent read, but I'd like the point out that the author really isn't making the case to save Flash as a technology. Rather, he's saying we should save all the content generated with Flash.

The headline is a little misleading.

<comment><USER12> Ok, we put Flash content in the title above.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> View the archived flash content in an ancient browser in a VM. We can't promise to be backwards compatible forever or we'll never move forward.</comment>